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Thursday, July 27, 2017

Leadership is a
fascinating quality. There are countless articles, studies and opinions about
what makes good leadership. But, no matter *how* you develop and act out your
own leadership qualities, there will always be two sides: A private,
individualistic view, and the view the public and your team sees.

Both are vital.

Let’s take a
look at leadership on two levels: leading yourself and your team.

Mastering the Moments

Self-leadership
may begin as a private matter, but it quickly moves to public view, and is
evident in moments as clear as the shallows in a placid lake.

When you see
it, you marvel – someone creating music no words can describe; a master
craftsman doing with ease what mere mortals could never do; or a leader,
intuitively uttering the right words with perfect timing.

Character,
although difficult to discern from a distance, always reveals itself up close.

If you look
carefully, you can often catch glimpses of a leader’s character on full
display. It is in those moments we are both inspired and challenged to raise
our own game.

When we see the
highest form of leadership in action, we are filled with the promise of our own
potential to become a servant leader. Is there anything more amazing to
witness?

These marks of
the servant leader are not the domain of superheroes. However, when we witness
them their effect may closely resemble super powers.

These are the
moments every leader must strive to master…

·We
want to seek wisdom when the world has decided a sound bite will do.

·We
want the audacity to expect the best in the most difficult of circumstances.

·We
want the ability to accept responsibility rather than blame others.

·We
long to do what is right without thought of personal costs.

·And,
more than anything else, we want to consistently put others ahead of ourselves.

These are the behaviors, even habits, we want and need to cultivate in our own
actions. It is our success here, in these moments that matters most.

Only when these
behaviors are harnessed and hotwired into our very soul, their power now under
our control…

Then, and only
then, does the servant earn the opportunity to become the leader.

Building Your Team to Change the World

As a leader
works to master his or her moments, the leader must also work to inspire
greatness in the action of his or her teams.

Great teams are
the stuff of legends. Throughout history, people coming together, pursuing a
common goal have, time and time again, made the inconceivable believable.

·Almost 2,500 years ago, it was a team that
rebuilt the walls around Jerusalem in 52 days - walls which had laid in
shambles for more than 140 years!

·It was a team of 400,000 dedicated
professionals at NASA which enabled men to walk on the moon.

·It was a team of artists, more than 500 of
them, who made over 2,000,000 sketches, which enabled sound and picture to come
to life like never before. The film released in 1937, was called Snow White.

And many of you
have been on a team that accomplished great feats and changed your world.

Now, it is your
turn. You are the one who can build the team.

When teams are
at their best, there is nothing like them. When they flounder in dysfunction
and poor leadership, their pain is palpable. A poorly led team is a colossal
waste of time, talent, energy and opportunity.

That is why
teams must be led well. A place where performance soars and potential is
realized. A place where talents are celebrated and dreams come true. Does this
sound like your team?

It can be…

Of the tasks a
leader will ever undertake, none may be easier to say and harder to do.
Although the time and energy required can be staggering, the effort pales in
light of the possibilities.

There is
something in all of us calling out to be part of something bigger, some thing,
or place, or team, where our talents can be leveraged, our passions can be
channeled and our sense of contribution fulfilled. That place can be your next
team.

Start building!

About Mark Miller

Mark Miller is
the best-selling author of 6 books, an in-demand speaker and the Vice President
of High-Performance Leadership at Chick-fil-A. His latest book, LeadersMade Here, describes how to nurture leaders throughout the organization, from
the front lines to the executive ranks and outlines a clear and replicable
approach to creating the leadership bench every organization needs.

Thursday, July 20, 2017

You can probably remember a dozen times just like this:
you’re at the head of a conference table with a haggard, tired team sitting
about you. They’re anxious, but eager to take action. You’ve assembled them
because a new crisis has arisen in the business: it might be a risk to your
best customer, a production shutdown, or a new product release gone terribly
awry.

All eyes are locked on you to lead them. What’s your first
step?

In my experience, most leaders in this situation begin
soliciting ideas from their team on how to resolve the crisis. This is
certainly a better step than many take, which is to try to play the hero and
dictate what ideas will be implemented. And it’s a very natural reaction: in
the middle of a crisis, most people want action, and they want it now. Every
minute spent sitting around talking is another minute that the crisis continues
and the fortunes of the business decline. And nobody wants a long, drawn-out
meeting where no action comes forth.

But this approach of soliciting ideas has a fatal flaw: all
of these “ideas” are in fact guesses. You’ve assembled smart, experienced
people in the room, and their experience can fool us into believing that one or
more of their guesses is likely to be an effective solution to the crisis. And
guessing can resolve some easy problems. However, truly difficult crises are
caused by hard problems. Guesses, even by experienced people in the business,
are unlikely to come up with the winning solution.

To solve the hard problem at the root of your crisis, you
need to take a different approach. It involves a strategic sort of patience.
You need to do the work to understand the root cause behind your crisis in
order to solve it effectively. To find the root cause, you need to stop guessing and use a different set of behaviors.

Know what problem
you’re solving. Most crisis response efforts attempt to solve the problem
without having defined it well in the first place. Often, problem definitions
contain assumptions about the cause of the problem, causing your team to work
on the wrong problem altogether. “Our supplier is sending us low quality materials,”
or “our core assets are too old” are both problem definitions that assume you
already know what’s wrong. Take a step back and define the problem based on
what you can observe directly.

Smell the problem. Your
first step during the crisis shouldn’t be to try implementing a guessed
solution; it should be quickly getting out of the conference room and getting
close to the problem to understand it. Pull up data that describes the pattern
of the problem, or go to the site of the problem and get familiar with it. If
you have unhappy customers, listen in depth to what they’re saying. If you have
a supply chain problem, go to the site and record in detail what’s going on.

Stay on target. As
you explore the problem, seek to quickly eliminate possible culprits. Investigate
it like Sherlock Holmes: instead of trying to confirm a hunch about a suspect,
look for evidence that eliminates the possibility that a suspect is the
criminal. When you have eliminated all suspects but one, you’ve found your
culprit. This relentlessness to eliminate possible root causes will quickly
move you towards the true root cause.

When you’ve found the root cause to your crisis, the most
effective and efficient solution will become readily apparent. You’ll be able
to implement it with greater speed, confidence, and consensus than if you were
trying out the best idea that bubbled up in your conference room. To rapidly
resolve the crisis in your business, focus your resources on understanding the
problem, rather than wasting them trying out guesses that may or may not work.

Learn what skills your team brings to the table in crisis
resolution with our free online quiz.

Nathaniel Greene
is the co-founder and current CEO of Stroud
International, and author of Stop Guessing:The 9 Behaviors of Great Problem-Solvers. Nat has a Masters of
Engineering from Oxford University and studied design, manufacturing and
management at Cambridge University, in addition to executive education
coursework in Harvard Business School's Owner/President Management program.

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Great
leaders lift up the people around them. They help employees harness their natural
abilities, guide the development of their skills, and support them along an
internal career path. Nurturing your organization’s team members has many
payoffs. Staff member stay dedicated to the company and its mission; employee
retention remains high; and in time, the organization gains its next generation
of leaders.

Unfortunately,
the persistent talent shortage across the globe is undermining these efforts. There
continue to be more jobs than qualified people to fill them. Further, this
talent shortage is delaying promotions, which keeps people stuck in their
current jobs because they’re the only ones who can do that job. Even when
there’s a career path for them, talented employees can’t advance in their own
company; they can’t step up because there’s simply no one available to take
their place.

You
can solve this problem by creating a rising tide of talent available to your
organization. Instead of focusing on succession plans that fail for lack of
qualified successors, developing a continuous influx of top talent expedites
advancement and elevates careers at all levels in your organization.

How
can you create a rising tide of talent? By ensuring your organization maintains
a wealth of quality people.

Determining Your
Current Talent Wealth

Talented
employees who do outstanding work are the secret ingredients that make a
company great. Sustaining a full complement of good employees fuels succession
plans and helps you maintain a competitive advantage.

Just
as there are levels of personal wealth, so too are there levels of talent
wealth within all companies. The departments in your organization are either talent
rich, talent poor, or hover somewhere in between. Understanding your current
level of talent wealth is important. Read the following descriptions and share
them with your organization’s department heads and HR. Work together to
determine which description best describes the current ranking of each
department.

1. Talent Rich
Departments

Talent
rich departments employ mostly above average people, many of who are top talent
in their fields of expertise. These people consistently do high quality work,
often exceeding expectations and beating deadlines. Numerous advancement
opportunities are almost always filled from within, creating new job opportunities.
These jobs are filled quickly from a pipeline filled with high quality job
candidates.

2. Talent Strong
Departments

Talent
strong departments employ people who are at least average at what they do. Some
of these employees are top talent in their fields of expertise. They do quality
work that meets expectations and deadlines. Advancement opportunities are
frequently filled from within, creating new job opportunities. Some open jobs
are filled quickly from a pipeline of talent. Other jobs take longer to fill,
delaying promotions until new employees are found.

3. Talent Stable
Departments

Talent
stable departments have a mixture of average and below average performers. Just
a few, if any, employees would be designated as top talent. The performance of
these employees is typically adequate, although they can struggle to meet
expectations and deadlines. Advancement opportunities, when they occur, are
sometimes filled from within. When jobs become open, it usually takes days to
fill some of them, weeks or months to fill the rest. Promotions are often
delayed or even cancelled when backfilling a role takes too long.

4. Talent Poor
Departments

Talent
poor departments employ a significant number of below average performers, along
with a handful of people who could be considered average in their roles. Rarely
is there anyone on the team who could be considered top talent. Job performance
is usually mediocre at best. Deadlines are often missed and expectations are
rarely exceeded. Advancement opportunities are rare, prompting people to leave
for other positions. When jobs open, it takes weeks or months to fill them.

Shaping the Future of
Your Organization’s Talent

Talent
rich businesses thrive while others struggle. Make maintaining high talent
wealth throughout your company a top priority to ensure its success. Require
that each department improve their ranking (or maintain their talent rich level
if that’s already been achieved). Support department heads in filling open jobs
and replacing subpar performers with quality hires. Work together with each
department to set a goal and a deadline for this improvement, such as raising
their current ranking one level or more by the end of the next business
quarter. If you need help drawing in quality job candidates and conducting an
efficient hiring process, my new
book will show you how.

The
flow of talent in your organization will determine its future, lifting careers
or sinking them, including your own. Hire exceptional people. Help them to be the
best versions of themselves. Offer them a path that elevates their careers and
yours. Build and maintain a wealth of talent that makes your organization an
unstoppable force in the marketplace.

Scott Wintrip has changed how
thousands of companies across the globe find and select employees, helping
design and implement a process to hire top talent in less than an hour. He is
the author of the bestselling new book HighVelocity Hiring: How to Hire Top Talent in an Instant (McGraw-Hill,
April 2017). Over the past 18 years, he built the Wintrip Consulting Group, a
thriving global consultancy. For five consecutive years, Staffing Industry
Analysts, a Crain Communications company, awarded Scott a place on the
“Staffing 100,” a list of the world’s 100 most influential leaders. He’s also a
member of the Million Dollar Consultant Hall of Fame and was recently inducted
into the Staffing 100 Hall of Fame.

Thursday, July 6, 2017

Despite the
fact that the stakes of business communications are often high, it’s sad
reality that most are really not very good.Survey after survey reveals that only about one quarter of internal
business presentations are rated as good or better by their audiences, while 75
percent languish as mediocre, poor, or terrible.

And for those
critical sales presentations that companies make to customers, the score is no
better. Data we’ve gathered shows that while companies self-assess the quality
of their solutions on average at 8.1 out of 10 (where 10 is excellent), those
same companies self-assess the quality of their solutions messaging at only
3.9/10. It’s little short of tragic to battle to finally get that elusive
customer meeting, only to deliver a 3.9/10 presentation.

Which raises a
fascinating question. Given that communication is such a high-stakes affair,
why are we so poor?

We have all
been subjected to some mind-numbing PowerPoint deck where the speaker toiled
through an endless series of slides, and in our gut we know that this can’t be
the right way to do it. But while it’s tempting to simply blame PowerPoint,
that is missing the point completely. The real problem is far more interesting
than the poor use of a software tool. It’s all about the poor use of an audience’s
brain.

Here’s the
real problem: the human brain is wired in very particular ways in how it wants
and needs to take in information. When communication aligns with how the brain
wants to consume information, incredible, breakthrough effectiveness is
possible. But when you misalign with the brain, you are guaranteed to fail. It
is certainly true that dense, excessive, poorly sequenced PowerPoint slides are
doomed to fail, but the reason is how badly that approach misaligns with the
way the brain works. The key isn’t prettier slides. The key is understanding
what the brain really wants.

For example,
at a cocktail party you are introduced to a random stranger. Three minutes
later you’ve completely forgotten his name.The reason this happens tells us something critical about how the brain
stores information.

The brain
stores information contextually. When presented with new information the brain
looks for context – for something to attach that information to. If it can find
it, the information can be stored. But if no context is found, it can’t be
stored. We call information like this an “intellectual orphan.”

Why does this
matter to communicators? When you create any argument that simply moves from
point to point – “That was point 3, let’s look at point 4” – but where there’s
no logical flow BETWEEN those points, you are presenting intellectual orphans
and your argument is destined to be forgotten within minutes.And it’s what most presenters do most of the
time.

So what’s the
solution to this particular problem? You need to take the substance of the
argument and create a logical sequential narrative, because sequence creates
the context that the brain needs.When
you read a book, chapter 6 makes perfect sense because of chapter 5. But if you
read the chapters out of sequence it won’t make any sense at all, even though
it’s exactly the same content. It’s the context that creates comprehension.

This is just
one example of the relationship between brain wiring and communication, and
it’s the reason why most people communicate badly - because they have no idea
what the brain’s rules are.

Based on 15
years work and research, I’ve identified six critical brain violations that
show up in almost all communication, and a six-step process for message design
that solves for these. And when communication is built using this model,
whether it’s a sales pitch, a TED talk or a CEO message to the troops, impact
and effectiveness skyrocket. (One client saw a sales conversion rate for one
solution jump from 15% to about 90%, simply because they finally learned how to
tell this complex story in a much simpler way.)

So, in the
spirit of giving you a really valuable and practical takeaway, let me share the
biggest lesson, and the most valuable thing you will ever learn about the way
your audience’s brain works.

Your brain and
mine operate at the level of ideas. If you were to sit through a long
presentation, even a great one, and afterwards, I asked you “what was that all
about?”… automatically, without even knowing you were doing it, you would
reduce that hour to one or two big ideas. It’s how our brains work. They are
reductionist. They traffic in ideas. They do NOT traffic at the level of facts
and data (especially lots of fact and data).

Do you
immediately see the problem? The overwhelming majority of communicators take an
approach that is thoroughly at odds with this reality. We bombard our audiences
with as much fact and data as we can, usually thinking that we are making the
best case we can, when in fact we are likely making the worst.

In the famous
OJ Simpson trial of 1993, the prosecution presented a mind-numbing seven months’
worth of fact and data. And yet, history clearly suggests that this was all
undone by ONE simple idea of eight words…. “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must
acquit”… and the fact that most of you reading immediately recognized the
phrase (even after a quarter of a century) is huge testimony to the incredible
brain-stickiness of an idea.

In almost any
presentation I see, the big ideas are murky at best, or completely hidden at
worst. Indeed, in most “decks” you can’t find the ideas at all. Next time you
are building any communication, go and apply this principle by asking this
question: “What are my 2-3 big ideas?” Then build around them. Make them clear,
prove them with your best data, not the most data you can, and strip away
everything else that’s secondary.